This photo is from the second day, when we started to work on making the stock of the crossbow.
These two photos are us attaching the bamboo to the stock to create the bow portion of the crossbow.
We created notches on the ends of the bamboo so that stringing the bow later would be much simpler.
Final Product.
The overall process went quite smoothly. My partner and I ran into a few issues that we hadn’t anticipated, mostly because we were not experienced with woodworking. For example, we learned that we wouldn’t be able to add the planned trigger mechanism, as the wood wouldn’t be able to handle the stress from attaching the trigger. We instead added a simple metal strip on the top of the crossbow that would act as a lever that pushed the string up. Additionally, we learned that we couldn’t simply screw on the bamboo, as bamboo was surprisingly brittle. Instead, we cut out a portion of wood from the front of the bow, glued the bamboo on, then reattached the removed portion. Other than that, we also experimented with bow string lengths. We eventually settled on a piece of sting 113 cm long, which would let the bow fire with force, but not enough to truly hurt anyone.